During a time of great fear of the yellow and red that is the People's Republic of China, Gough Whitlam, the leader of the opposition, led a delegation to Beijing to meet with the premier, Zhou Enlai.

Taking a huge gamble with a forthcoming election, Whitlam's visit is seen as 'a symbolic and psychological break with Australia's past' and there was 'no going back'.

However, current Labor government policies -- according to Stephen Fitzgerald, Australia's first ambassador to China and part of the Whitlam 1971 delegation to Beijing -- are removed from Whitlam's rationale about Australia and China's relationship.

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Dr Gideon Polya :

06 Oct 2012 2:39:13pm

Excellent interview with Dr Stephen Fitzgerald about Gough Whitlam's historic recognition of China. Would that there were more such informed, intelligent MPs and public servants involved in Australia's foreign policy today.

The Chinese has a rough time in Australia with mass deportations and murderous "Chinamen hunts" that complemented "Aboriginal hunts" in the 19th century, spurred on by explicit, genocidal racism of poets Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson . Australia's first PM, Edmund Barton, declared (1901, in support of the White Australia Policy) that "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of an Englishman and the Chinaman" (see my book "Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History", now available for free perusal on the Web).

The golden - but unfortunately US- and US lackey-terminated - Whitlam era of 1972-1975 was succeeded by worsening violent racism of both Labor and Coalition towards Asia involving blind bipartisan support for more US Asian Wars (12 million deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation in the Zionist-backed, post-1990 US War on Muslims; Google "Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide"). In shades of the Khemlani Affair, a Rudd Labor Minister was blackened and pushed out for dining with a Chinese business woman. Wikileaks has revealed that Kevin Rudd suggested war with China to Hilary Clinton and that Kim Beazley offered Australian troops in that eventuality - much to the alarm of former PM Malcolm Fraser who cited Sir Robert Menzies telling the endlessly warmongering Yanks in the 1950s that if they had a war with China, Australia would have nothing to do with it (see Malcolm Fraser's informed and sensible views by Googling "Slavish devotion to the US a foreign policy folly for Australia").

The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist-beholden Australian Lib-Lab (Liberal-Laboral) anti-China, US lackey approach is consonant (albeit in a disingenuously PC way) with the view of the former Israeli ambassador to Australia who disgustingly declared that: "Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not. We are basically the white race" Google "Two white sisters in Asia: Israel and Australia").